Teresa welcomes Michelle to first wives' club

PITTSBURGH -- Teresa Heinz Kerry welcomed Michelle Obama to her adopted hometown today, passing a torch from one occasionally controversial first-lady-in-waiting to another.

"You know there are not many people who have gone through this who you can reach out to and say, 'What is this going to be like?'" Obama said, praising the last spouse of a Democratic nominee as an "exceptional mentor to me personally" who has "been so generous with her time and emotions."

While Senator John Kerry has campaigned actively for Obama since endorsing him in January -- and will be touring Pennsylvania this weekend on behalf -- his wife has been largely silent this campaign season. Heinz Kerry has surfaced largely as the object of skeptical comparisons to Michelle Obama, as independent spouses whose provocative remarks have proven occasionally distracting from the candidate's message.

"Michelle and I have become good friends mostly through the Blackberries," Heinz Kerry -- introduced only as "Teresa Heinz" -- said at a gym at Carnegie Mellon University, where she serves as a trustee and her late ex-husband, Pennsylvania Senator John Heinz, taught before seeking public office. "Because she's not busy and neither am I."

Yet each found a dramatically different voice to make her case. Heinz Kerry spoke in a miasmic whisper, beginning her brief speech where she frequently started when campaigning on her husband's behalf in 2004: discussing how prized American elections are to her as an immigrant from Mozambique whose father was unable to cast a vote for much of his life.

"In our society, we tend to be so numerical -- everything is inches or dollars or whatever," said Heinz Kerry, a former Republican who has proven an occasionally forceful presence in Pennsylvania politics, as she made the case against those who discount Barack Obama as inexperienced. "I know the most important things are not just what you know but what you do with what you know."

Michelle Obama brought a politician's cadence to her fifty-minute speech, delivering spitfire observations that built naturally towards applause lines, devoting much her speech to a detailed accounting of her husband’s successes as a candidate in numerical terms, citing the size his contributor base and the share of counties he won in South Carolina’s primary.

"Barack Obama will always be the underdog. No matter how much money he raises, now matter how many wins he pulls together, no matter how many delegates he accumulates, he is still the underdog," she said. "That’s the way it works."